What I Loved About Last Week 17th and 18th Ed.

So, I'm doubling up weeks again, forgive me!

What I loved about July 9-15th:

1. Wet and Wild.  Our local volunteer fire dept. came to the city park to spray the fire hoses for the kids to run around in and have fun.  Surprise, surprise, brave, crazy Ruby was more into it than cautious Ira.  Both of them did have a lot of fun though.

2. Playing together.  Ira and Ruby really do play so well together.  The other day, I overheard them playing with dinosaurs.  Talk about your total boy/girl difference.  Ira was knocking them down and having them fight with each other.   Ruby having the dinosaurs bite each other than give each other a kiss and say sorry.   It was so funny!

3. You may have noticed that the pictures I feature on my blog are on SmugMug (a photosharing/storage site.)  Well, it saved my tushy the other day.  I usually try to keep 2 copies of my pictures for back-up purposes: one on my external hard drive, and one on SmugMug.  Well, I was reorganizing some folders on the external hard drive and accidentally deleted the entire month of December 2011.  (And no, it wasn't in the recycle bin, before I deleted it, it said "this folder is too big for the recycle bin - delete files permanently?")  Luckily, they were on SmugMug and I was able to recover them all in about 4 zip files.

4. Put up 7 quarts of dill pickles!

5. Had a new nephew!!  My beautiful sister had her baby on July 11th and we got to go up to the hospital and snuggle him before he was even 12 hours old.  Man do I love me some squishy newborn!  The kids were absolutely enthralled too.  Come on God, give us one in our house too!

6. Picked out Ruby's hair.  What do you do when you're bored... you pick out your daughter's extremely curly hair to see how "big" it gets.  What do you think???

Girl would've been a rockstar in the 80's... or in Texas...

7. Updated our budget.  It was about 6 weeks behind, and although it's a pain to track every penny - it is totally worth it for us.  It feels really good to know where we stand with our finances.

8. Along those lines, I am so proud of my hubby who got a promotion and a raise!!  We sat down together and re-worked some of the budget to allow for more savings in a few places.  We'll see how diligent we can be!

9. Spent a crazy Saturday going to 4 different events.  1.Met up with a good online-friend who I'd never met in real life.  We also got to snuggle her sweet new baby!  2.Went to an anniversary party for a family friend where I got to catch up with some people that I hadn't seen for 15+ years.  It was a really neat party!  3.Celebrated the baptism of aforementioned nephew.  It is such a beautiful ceremony - welcoming a baby into God's family.  Love it every time!  4.Went out to my younger sister's house and played cards and toured their new property.  It was a full day, but boy was it fun!

10. The day after all that craziness, I wasn't sure how productive we'd be, but we actually got something checked off the to-do list that I'd wanted to do for a LONG time.  After we laid Ruby down for her nap, we set out all of Ira's toys in the basement family room and decided which ones to keep and which ones to chuck (or sell, any ideas on how to go about that?)  We started by asking Ira which toy he absolutely couldn't live without (his drum set) and then asking him to pick one that he absolutely didn't care about at all anymore (a hacky-sack.) And continued asking those same 2 questions until we'd gone through every single toy in the house. If you're good at math - you'll realize that means we have HALF as many toys as we used to!  It's working well for us.  Ira seems proud of the job he did and is happy with the toys he has left.  Combatting commercialism/materialism one toy at a time here...

Before

After.  Kind of hard to tell, but there really are a TON less toys.
All the toy box lids close now!

Here's what I loved about July 16-22

Hmm.... I can't even remember what we did last week really...

I know we took care of Andy's parents' plants while they were out of town...

Ruby got her hair trimmed to help some major tangle issues...

I went to the dentist to get a pesky tooth looked at... it still needs some work...

We welcomed Andy's folks home from their trip and looked at awesome picture of whales and eagles and glaciers...

We played at home...

We welcomed Totus Tuus teachers into our home on Saturday...

We had cinnamon rolls for breakfast and homemade pizza for lunch on Sunday...

I don't know - apparently last week wasn't that exciting.  I have no pictures, and no notes written down about anything that happened.  So there you have it I guess.  I bet you're hoping I take notes about this week.  Definitely makes for much more exciting posts!  Blessings!

Totus Tuus

Mid-July, our parish was blessed to host the Totus Tuus program. For those who don't know - Totus Tuus (Latin for totally yours) is a week-long Catholic Bible School Program. When I was growing up, my mom organized the Totus Tuus program for our parish. Each summer I looked forward to the program and to getting to know the teams (we always had 2-4 people stay with us and hosted 2 meals during the week.) I am blessed with many, many wonderful friends from the Totus Tuus program and I credit Camp Totus Tuus for much of my spiritual development in High School. So when I saw that they were coming to our town, I was eager to help out!

The one thing that was really needed was host families for the team, so Andy and I decided to keep the two girls from the team at our house. We thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Korbi and Christine throughout the week. Ira was positively in love with them and got up early each morning so that he could eat breakfast with them. Even though he wasn't old enough to go to the day program, Ira still got a lot out of Totus Tuus being at our parish. If you ever have the opportunity to send you kids to Totus Tuus' day program, or are financially able to send them to Camp Totus Tuus, I would highly recommend it!!

(pardon the red eyes, I forgot to edit this pic before I uploaded it!)